The Art of the English Murder

From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock

By: Lucy Worsley

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Murder: a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy - and a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves? In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early 19th century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime - and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul.

©2014 Lucy Worsley (P)2014 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Worsley's vivid account excites as much as its sensational subject matter, and edifies, too, thanks to her learned explications." ( Publishers Weekly)

Interesting but distracting narrator

I love Lucy Worsley books and shoes. This narrator was horrible to listen to. She has a strange cadence and sounds like there are marbles in her mouth.

Not my favorite by Lucy Worsley…

…but it’ll do.


I find myself constantly distracted while listening to the book on Audible. I’ll hear something interesting in the book and go to my phone to research a lil further—as the chapter plays on— then I realize I haven’t listened in 10 minutes and have to rewind.

Interesting History

I had seen the documentary mentioned in the book prior to purchasing this. The book covers similar ground but follows different paths and gets into more detail than the program. I enjoyed the performance of the audiobook, but I admit I had hoped that Lucy would have recorded it herself.

Loved this book!

It's more than true crime. Sure, there's a couple homicides, but much beyond that- social commentary, history, an occasional touch of the macabre. Two thumbs up. Just wish the actual author was narrating it.

IF you're a fan of british murder stories.....

This book focuses on the British fascination with murder. Apparently once public hangings and the ability to trounce all over active murder investigation scenes was denied the British public, this morbid need was replaced with murder mysteries. Or at least that’s Worsley’s theory. She then goes through a history of famous murders and talks about how they worked their way into English Literature. Apparently for instance, readers of Dickens’ time would have known Oliver Twist was a crime novel based on the title, as a twist was slang of the time for someone who hung from a noose; and Austen’s Northanger Abbey wasn’t a romance so much as a sendup of the popular horror novels of her age (the heroine is a young girl who’s read too much of them goes to the abbey expecting ghosts and horror — as the world Abbey would be another keyword in a title that would communicate to readers of the time that this would be a horror book, only to discover more realistically disturbing issues, such as how many rich people of Austen’s time owed their wealth to slavery… something the Austen Biography I read just before this had also discussed). …. and she's very interested in the life stories of female murder writers, much more so than the men... and covers the profession of the genre